Buzzing Back to the Hive

Academic jobs (and many others, I suppose) tend to be pieced together out of a variety of activities/obligations. Right now, I’m juggling three chunks of work: my Shakespeare class, a textbook review for a publishing house, and mastering my “new job”: ELWR (Entry-Level Writing Requirement) Coordinator at UC Santa Cruz. You may remember my entry from May when I talked about the joys of UC’s statewide writing placement test and the process of reading thousands of student essays (two to three times each) over the course of a single weekend. Well, I’m now in charge of that exam on my campus and all the record-keeping and detail-tracking-down that entails. I will coordinate four yearly administrations of the exam here, organize two major readings of student portfolios, track all the pass/no-pass data, make sure student records are accurate, and do anything else related to the placement exam that falls into my lap—returning calls from worried students and fretting parents, projecting class enrollments, and the like. This job requires a very detailed calendar and a gazillion to-do lists. I’m approaching it with the idea that if I do 3-6 little tasks for it pretty much every day, then I won’t get buried alive. I desperately hope I am right about this.

Today I sorted through several hundred electronic files bequeathed to me by the former ELWR Coordinator. I didn’t read them all, but I created my own on-line filing system for them in hopes that I’ll be able to find the data I need as questions arise. I also did my first-ever work creating/adapting excel documents and sent those out to various people.

Having been a dutiful worker bee, I’m now heading home for some knitting, some noshing, and some baseball watching. I’m on number two of the four-of-a-kind pattern-writing project. I’m also back to playing with dishcloths. Did you know that Lily’s Sugar & Cream comes in self-striping colorways? I didn’t—at least not until I came across this yarn at Michaels over the weekend. On an eight-inch dishcloth the stripes come out one-to-two inches wide (wider than the pictures on Lily’s web site make them appear). I can’t wait to try combining one of these yarns with a solid color for a Mason-Dixon style dishcloth.

By the way, if you’re a reader of fiction, check out Tracy Chevalier’s Burning Bright. To sum it up in a sentence, Burning Bright relates a year in the life of two children who are neighbors of the poet/artist/philosopher/printer William Blake (1757-1827), but that description doesn’t begin to do it justice. This book is a wonderful mix of opposites: simple on the surface, but complex in the topics it deals with; both a story of childhood and an exploration of English politics at the time of the French Revolution. It reads easily, but stays with you, leaving you to ponder all sorts of interesting questions.